i was thinking aboutif the closing party's are they working ! ive seen a few very badly attended and some very good . goods ones tend to be local artist and bad ones not . can we change this ? one idea is to have it always on the same day , then we can promote it better and people can expect it . currently we tend to find out about the closing party very late making it hard to promote it

also the point of the closing partys is to engage wiht the public , is it a cabal that people dont feel that they are welcome to enter . i think its an important event for people to chat about art and the gallery to become self aware

often I feel that the closing party is relatively segregated from the events going on in the main room.
Would it be a good idea to incorporate them together a bit more to get a good vibe going.
shazam!

quite a lot of stuff sorted out tonight and things discussed . a couple points said briefly but need a bit more attention is that steve felt we where not recivng many submissions andi think this goes hand in hand with the need to better promote the gallery within edinburgh and afar . an easy thing to do is flyers and posters , and get them up in places !
once upon a time total kusnt did ads in AN magazine , this can raise the profile of the gallery . is this something we might like to do again? i think an ad in skinny would be good , in the listing it only mentions total kunst not where

i also think better guidelines for digital submittions may be needed to be done , one of the emails has 2 mb images , these are too big for our needs , and they have to downloaded individuality which takes time . ideally it would nice if someone prepared all the submissions before hand , i wil try to do this for the next meeting and do some research into what other galleries do

currently i prefer the paper submissions and cds , we seem a lot happier with them ! should we encouraged this more ?coupled with better digital guidelines . hopefully this may cut down the endless replys , where we are asking for basic info .

what i like is when we can have a simple slide show of the work and a bit of writing or ripping open envelopes to see what inside

ive looked into advertising , it expensive , in map its for a Quarter page colour £250 (portrait) , AN magainzine is for 1/4 page £395 . map is quarterly and AN is monthly. Map i think is manly a scottish centric mag wheras AN is national . i guess we could share a space .

maybe we have to find a creative solution to this problem wiht the resources we already have

i dont thinks it too bad . it best out of what ive looked at .heres the skinnys prices , these are exclusive of vat , which i would think the other prices are too

Quarter Page £340
Half Page £560
Full Page £920

but if we do something like this , it may a consideration when we do it . there is talk about what we are doing for the festival , do we try to get some really good shows for that or do we wait and see what comes in . or do we pick from past shows . we should really get thinking about this now as once again we will be in the edinburgh art festival promos , its good for the forest

it really depends on how effective it is and when you do it and where you do it . for instance adverts in the AN magazine is going to reach alot of people around the country , which we may wish for . whereas a local ads it only edinburgh . its an option

i havent even looked into how much tv ads cost yet! TKTV

i do think we need to do more local stuff , posters in eca and around town , thats for sure .

not sure how it can work since most of our shows would be over before it got printed . but retrospectively i think it would still be useful to us and the artist getting feedback .and for the skinny getting coverage of an important arts venue . currently i feel we are being missed out , we had a good program of shows with little coverage in press .

Web marketing has gotten harder and harder over the years because so few people click on banners these days. £8 a month? maybe.

And I think we could spend £250 far far better,

I think its better to work on reviews and other press. I know most reviews would miss our shows but a string of solid reviews and people would start keeping an eye on us, so it would work. If people write reviews I could pass them on to the student paper to. For my part, if anyone writes reviews, I can offer photos to be submitted with them.